Self-edited ramblings about whatever I feel like talking about. Usually related to some sort of game-like activity.

March 26, 2009

JSA: Guest-Starring...Lobo!?

For last week's "Special Guest Star" tournament I wanted to really mix things up. Having never played the team, I'd been thinking about building a JSA deck for quite some time, but had never gotten around to it. With my team chosen, I tried to come up with something that was really off-the-wall, but could possibly happen in a comic book...provided the editorial staff had been plied with enough liquor before reading the premise. After wracking my brain a little bit, I thought that throwing Lobo in there just might be crazy enough to work!

This deck isn't exactly optimized for characters or plot twist abuse, and I'm actually not quite sure if what I tried to do works. The special rule for the event was that our guest star gains an affiliation of our choice, in this case Lobo gaining the JSA team affiliation. On turn 6 we want to have Lobo become stunned, allowing us to bring out the second copy of him from our deck. Using a copy of Revitalize we recover the first stunned copy and try to keep them both around for turn 7.

On turn 7, we team attack with the Lobos, using a copy of Double Play on each of them to ready and keep them from getting stunned for the turn. Another team attack, or exhausting effects should allow us to drop a copy or two of Press the Attacks on them both to attack for a total of three times each. It is possible to trigger this on turn 6, but much more difficult to do.

The glitch is simple and something I need to double-check the rules on. Since Lobo doesn't have an identity (marked with the <> symbol after his name), I think we also need to play Moment of Crisis to give him an identity before Double Play is legal. It's not an easy combo to pull off, but I was able to do it once in my four games of play. It was a lot of fun to see it all come together, even if it was only once!

With a little optimization I think the deck could work, but it needs some defense and a little tighter character selection earlier on. I do plan to tweak it a little bit for fun. A full set of Lobo would be beneficial too, but I haven't been able to round up another pair of them.